MacchiM20

After World War I, Macchi's technical department, headed by Eng. Alessandro Tonini designed two small touring and training biplanes.

The single-seat M.16 and the two-seat M.20 featured a deep fuselage, narrow track landing gear and internal shock absorbers. The wooden fuselage structure lacks metal wires and tighteners in order to solve the rod adjustment problems. Both aircrafts featured low-power Anzani radial engines.

Despite the empty weight only amounted to 340 kg, the low power had a strong influence on performance. To serve training purposes, the M.20 featured disconnectable double commands and one of them was experimentally fitted with floating commands. Due to the wide

offer of aircrafts that survived the war, the M.16/M.20 failed to obtain commercial success; however, on 12 October 1924 a M.20 driven by De Briganti earned the “Coppa Italia” on the Ciampino, Montecelio, Centocelle circuit.

In 1925, Eng. Mario Castoldi became technical director, and the M.20 was re-designed, replacing the thin wing profile with a thicker one, and alierons were fitted on the upper wings. The M.20 displayed at the Aeronautical Museum "Gianni Caproni" is the oldest original Macchi designed aircraft existing in Italy. It was probably built at the beginning of the 1920s and its wings were later replaced. In 1929, it was bought by the “Società Anonima Aerocentro Emiliano” with a Salmson AD.9 engine and it was registered as I-AABO in March 1930. In September 1933 it was transferred to Rimini Aero Club, where it suffered an incident and was later erased from the register. The aircraft was actually acquired by Piero Magni, a manufacturer based in Milan, who in 1939 modified it by lengthening and rounding the edges of the wings, widening the cabin and changing the stabilisers. With this new structure, however, the aircraft did not manage to obtain a certificate of navigability.

In the 1950s, the fuselage and the wings were recovered by the Caproni brothers thanks to Eng. Pier Carlo Bergonzi, pioneer of Italian aviation.

The aircraft's remains were restored, as usual, by Masterfly in Rovereto between 1988 and 1990, and the missing parts were rebuilt using the original designs preserved in the AerMacchi archive. The colours and the signs refer to a non-registered M.20 used in a series of competitions that took place between 1924 and 1925.